by Tom Clancy
Another night a year later, at Luke AFB, where Horner was wing commander, OSI agents boarded the van used on the wing’s flight line to transport mechanics out to the various F-15 fighter aircraft that needed maintenance. They arrested not only the van’s driver for dealing in illegal drugs, but seven technicians who just happened to be taking a “hit” before going to work in the vitals of a $30 million jet.
There was a race problem, too, but race was not as serious an issue in the Air Force as it was in the nation as a whole. Racial polarization in the Air Force setting was in reality a reflection of the alienation of the young from the officers and NCOs. A unit that had pride and discipline did not tolerate racial polarization, because they were a team. Unfortunately, there were all too few teams.
Chuck Horner takes up the story:
The lack of retention of trained mechanics and aircrews, the drugs, and the apparent lack of defense funding were the excuses. But the real reason we were on our ass was much simpler: we had lost the vision of who we were, what was important, and how to lead and how to follow, how to treat our people both with love and discipline and a sense of mission. In short, we had lost pride in ourselves. Pride is not arrogance. As Dizzy Dean said, “If you done it, it ain’t bragging.” Our “ done it” was simply being ready to go to war, and in war to win.
Well, we weren’t able to honestly claim we’ d “ done it.” The result was we were living a lie and had lost our pride. Do not scoff at pride. For a military person, pride is vital. How else do you think we get people to work long days and weekends, leave their families at a moment’s notice, endure living in tents and eating packaged food that no grocery store could sell, and do all that with minimum pay and the expectation that they might have to lay down their very lives? Military units live on pride, pride born of confidence in themselves and the man or woman on their left and right. Sure, they take pride in serving the nation, and they get goose bumps when they see its flag. But what really counts is pride in doing their job well, pride in their subordinates and leaders, and pride that their lives are spent serving a cause higher than themselves. After Vietnam, we tore pride down instead of building it. We lied about our readiness, we shortcut our maintenance, we chased our tails trying to fly more when in fact we flew less, our aircraft were dirty and broken and they looked broken, we dumped our people in housing that wasn’t habitable, our pay was frozen (in an effort to halt inflation), and our troops worked in temporary buildings left over from World War II that would have embarrassed any Third World slum. Discipline along with pride had fallen by the wayside, so the good ones walked and the feeble ones turned to drugs. We had become a Communist nation within the very organization that was to protect our nation from the threat of communism.
★ Then, in 1978, General W. L. “Bill” Creech was appointed commander of TAC.
A onetime leader of the Skyblazers and Thunderbird acrobatic teams, Bill Creech was a consummately skilled and precise fighter pilot. After a tour as Director of Operations at the Nellis Fighter Weapons School, he’d served as the senior assistant to General Sweeney, the bomber pilot who then commanded TAC, and the author of those infamous impromptu phone calls. Though he never said an unkind word about General Sweeney, Creech took care never to emulate him. Above all, Bill Creech was a practical philosopher and psychologist. In analyzing problems, his philosophical side looked well beyond the obvious in a search for root causes; he then doggedly worked for ways to prevent things from going wrong again. As a psychologist, he was a student of human nature, seeking to understand why people made mistakes — not in order to rebuke them, but to find ways to change the environment that led to the failures.
He was eccentric, fastidious about his personal appearance, tireless in his search for excellence, and as demanding of himself as he was of others.
How did he begin to address the problems of the Air Force?
The essential Air Force vision has always remained the same: the application of force — quickly, precisely, violently, massively. Aircraft in the air doing whatever it takes to gain control of the air, putting weapons precisely on their targets, flying as safely as possible. Success in each of these areas can be measured. The data can be very precise. How many aircraft do you have flying (and not, for example, in the hangars being repaired)? How many hours are the pilots in the air learning their skills? How well are they learning those skills? How many bombs are on target? How many planes crashed per given period of time?
By any serious measure, the Air Force was not answering those questions satisfactorily, but why? What was preventing good, highly motivated people from doing the work that they passionately wanted to do?
The answer, Creech decided, was centralization, the top-down management structures so beloved of Robert McNamara and the SAC generals. Creech hated centralization, because it robbed the individual of ownership of his job, deprived him of responsibility, and destroyed his initiative. The people in the Air Force, he liked to say, had turned into Russian workers: “We pretend to work and they pretend to pay us.” For him, centralization was a fantasy based on the dream of a totally efficient institution, but it wrecked against the hard rocks of actual, everyday human personality and behavior. People simply didn’t operate the way centralization expected and predicted they would.[23]
Every organization is made up of building blocks, and if the organization is running smoothly, these building blocks mesh smoothly together. The way centralization does it is to organize them from the top down, and functionally — that is, by functional specialty, and by the job done within that function. For instance, specialists are gathered together in centralized locations and sent to work on jobs as needed: electricians work together with other electricians, hydraulics specialists work with other hydraulics specialists, all parts are located in a centralized supply area, and so on.
Under this system, all jets and all the people who work on them are alike and interchangeable. The whole mass is rated, and individual success or failure is obscured. The basic rationale for this is “economies of scale”: efficiency, cost savings, elimination of duplication.
When Bill Creech arrived at TAC Command, however, he found no hard data supporting any of these claims — in fact, quite the opposite. When all the electricians worked from a centralized shop, and were dispatched in trucks to service an entire wing’s flight line (three squadrons of twenty-four aircraft apiece, a total of seventy-two fighters), there was a lot of travel, coordination, and paperwork involved. There were no economies of scale. With a centralized storage area, it took an average of three and a half hours from the time a part was ordered from the storage area to the time it was delivered to its customer. By then the technician who ordered it would have either moved on to another job, cooled his heels and drunk several cups of coffee with his buddies, perhaps lost interest in the job, or even conceivably forgotten the nature of the problem he was originally fixing. Out of the 4,000 TAC aircraft, 234 a day, on average, were what were called “hangar queens,” those grounded for more than three weeks for supply or maintenance problems. Of those aircraft that broke in some way during a normal flight, only one out of five were flyable again on the day they broke. And overall mission-capable rates were at 50 percent or less. (By way of comparison, in the stress and high tempo of Desert Storm, mission-capable rates were at over 95 percent.)
The “functional fiefdoms” (as Creech called them) of electricians, supply, weapons specialists, and so on, were oriented, he discovered, not toward satisfying the needs of the primary product (the aircraft) and of the various subsidiary products and functions connected with keeping the aircraft in the air, but toward satisfying the needs of the organization. Also, because of the vertical orientation of these fiefdoms, they did not work easily or comfortably together with the other fiefdoms — they didn’t mesh well with each other, as Creech put it.
“When’s the last time you washed a rental car?”
— A SERGEANT IN CONVERSATION WITH BILL CREECH
What did Creech do to change TAC?
First he started an education campaign, and used hard data to persuade those who believed in centralized systems that they had failed. Meanwhile, he set up trial units as models of decentralization, and then he compared the two. Once the hard data had proved the superiority of decentralized systems, he began to put those systems in place throughout TAC.
He reshaped the basic building blocks from vertical to horizontal, and broke up the “functional fiefdoms.” Flight line maintenance, for example, was organized and integrated into product-oriented squadron teams (and smaller), in which electricians, aircraft mechanics, and hydraulics specialists all worked together. Members of one specialty were given elementary training in other specialties, so they could help their colleagues out, when needed, and would also have a better sense of the whole problem. Now, instead of a centrally administered central supply complex, all supplies directly related to aircraft supply were moved to the flight line, together with “dedicated” supply specialists who were devoted only to their flight line customer. Small computers that kept track of inventories also helped.
The squadron teams each set their own goals and devised their own schedules. Each made its own decisions, all of them aimed at the final product — planes in the air.
Finally, each fighter aircraft now had a “dedicated crew chief,” whose name was painted on the side of the aircraft. That aircraft was now “his” or “hers.” They “owned” it. It was up to them to be responsible for decisions — including mistakes — rather than waiting for orders from headquarters. While they would surely help one another out if needed, and the various technical specialists within the squadron teams were available to help, their performance was judged on how their jet or flight or squadron unit performed. At the same time, they were given what they needed, including more training, to make their jet perform well.
In time, Creech’s decentralizing led to real ownership and empowerment, real teamwork, clear-cut accountability (poor performance was now easy to track), and a system in which people were able to operate as humans and not as functions in some machine.
Problems began to be solved by the people closest to them, to be cut off at the source. The problem solvers were freed both to do it right and also to make mistakes. Mistakes will be made — the key is to try to prevent them from recurring, and the best way is to make sure they are self-correcting.
More practically, he attacked the root causes of TAC’s lack of readiness: He closed sick units so there would be enough trained people and parts to make the better units healthy. He kicked the senior NCOs out of their air-conditioned offices, where they had migrated under the centralized style of management, and placed them out on the flight lines, where they were truly in charge. He expected combat flying proficiency from his colonels and generals, so confidence in combat leadership began to be restored among the warriors. He ruthlessly rooted out and destroyed procedures and processes designed to maintain control for its own sake. He dictated goals and standards, then built visible and understandable scorecards that rated what actually mattered (such as sorties flown or aircraft in commission). As he slowly moved to decentralized leadership, he raised the goals and standards ever higher, as each day the men and women who worked for him proved they could exceed even his expectations.
He also made sure these changes were built on a foundation of absolute truth. Lying, shading of the truth, and making excuses were completely unacceptable. To make that point clear throughout TAC, Creech made a number of highly visible “public executions.”
Here is one example:
Before Creech, the great game among commanders was to tell higher headquarters they could accomplish what was asked of them, when in fact they knew they could not, either because they didn’t have the training or the resources, or because the mission was impossible. In fact, any commander who told the truth was likely to be fired. Under these conditions, the best promised as little as they could get away with, and through their own individual efforts made their units perform adequately; and in that way they didn’t have to shade the truth overly much. On the other hand, the worst commanders simply lied and juggled the books. Some commanders spoke up and told it like it actually was. If they were very intelligent and savvy, they were actually listened to, and some changes were made. Others, not so savvy, were fired for not being team players in what Chuck Horner calls “the grand hoax.”
In the F-4D, for instance, there was a computer-based bomb-release system, called the Dive Toss System, that supposedly allowed the aircrews to drop bombs from high altitude and thus to stay out of most visually aimed ground fire. The problem was that the Dive Toss System didn’t work.
Nevertheless, the training rules called for F-4D aircrews with this system to achieve bomb scores of a certain average — say, CEP (Circular Error Probable) of fifty feet. The aircrew would fly the aircraft out to a bombing range and drop a bomb using the Dive Toss System, the range crew would then score their bomb impacts, and that data would be amassed at the wing and reported to TAC. Unless a certain percentage of the crews achieved the desired CEP or higher, the wing was not judged combat-ready. Yet, achieving a satisfactory CEP was usually a gamble, either because crew training was often inadequate, or worse, because the bomb-release computer in the Dive Toss System was more often than not malfunctioning. That left the aircrews faced with a no-win situation: since the system was incapable of giving them a fifty-foot average CEP, everyone up to the wing commander had to lie, or else the wing commander would be fired (though sometimes the wing commander would fire the squadron commanders and the chief of maintenance instead).
That meant that a crew would roll in on the target and call the pass: “Two’s in for a Dive Toss”; but they would set their switches for a manual release, get the proper sight picture for the dive angle, airspeed, and wind condition, then release the bomb and make an abrupt pull-up so their friend on the ground scoring the bombs would see a Dive Toss, and not a manual dive, maneuver. Often they would drop a bomb with an even smaller CEP, which made the wing look very, very good. The commander would duly be promoted. The only thing that suffered was integrity. The crews called the event Dive Cheat.
Meanwhile, the generals thought they had a superior combat capability in the Dive Toss System, a system that just got better and better the more it was used because as the crews dropped more and more manual bombs, they grew more and more accurate.
One day, one of the F-4D captains suffered an attack of conscience and sent an anonymous letter to Creech that described the Dive Cheat situation. As a result, Creech sent the TAC Director of Operations, Major General Larry Welch, to investigate.
When Welch arrived, everyone in the wing except the wing commander told the truth. However, the wing commander claimed he knew nothing about what was really going on, even though he was current in the jet, and knew how he was getting his own bomb scores and certainly how everyone else was getting theirs. Not only that, he tried to throw the blame on others. He might possibly have survived what followed if he’d at least said something like: “Yes, sir, General Creech, my guys cheated, and I cheated, but that is what you wanted us to do, and we hate you and ourselves for doing it.” But he didn’t. In consequence, Creech had him fired in view of all corners of TAC. Afterward, everyone got the message that there was a new way of doing business that depended on telling the truth, that bad news was acceptable if you had done your best and still failed, and that lying or shading the truth to look good were far worse than failing.
★ All of this restored pride. But that wasn’t enough. Creech also insisted on raising standards of appearance. Pity the poor commander whose base was not clean and painted. If he had to, he went downtown and bought his own tools and paint. He paid attention to color — no Easter eggs, but earth tones pleasing to the eye, yet businesslike. He paid attention to military dress. Combat uniforms were fine, but they better be properly worn, neat, and clean (unless soiled from hard work). It wasn’t just looks that a c
ommander watched out for. He paid attention to his people, he moved among them and listened to them, learning from all ranks as they figured out how to do their jobs more efficiently and quickly. He paid attention to families, too (family support centers and child-care facilities, for instance), so that people could concentrate on their work. Most of all, he paid attention to discipline. Discipline is fundamental to the good order needed to succeed in combat, and fundamental to pride. Hard tests were given in the air, on the flight line, and in all the multitude of areas that are required to carry out wartime missions. There were no excuses: If you failed, it was because you needed training, and you got it. If you needed resources, they were found. If you were overextended, you were given time to grow. But if you lacked the necessary desire, leadership, or integrity to be in the new military, you were given the opportunity to succeed in civilian life.
RESULTS
Here are some of the before-and-after performance data of the Creech reforms at TAC:
• The on-average three and a half hours from the order of a part to its delivery shrank to eight minutes.
• Pilot training sorties were doubled, increasing pilot skills and readiness.
• The number of aircraft grounded for maintenance was reduced by 73 percent.
• Hangar queens were reduced from an average of 234 per day to only eight per day.
• Fighters that landed with problems were now fixed much more quickly. The rate of those repaired on the same day was improved by 270 percent. Where before one out of five were flyable again on the same day, now it was four out of five.